Monday, February 23, 2004

BOOG CITY Readings, New York

I found this on David A. Kirschenbaum's blog (he's Boog City publisher & events organizer in New York). It's pretty funny, & a pretty close description of events, during & after a reading I did with Clare Latremouille & Stephen Brockwell at his series on January 7th, 2004. You can check out the original at the link below:

http://boogcity.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_boogcity_archive.html

The Reading and After

Hosted the 6th reading so far in my out-of-town small press series this past Thursday. The good folks from above/ground press came down from ottawa, canada. They just turned 10, and in that time editor/publisher has put out 400 or so publications, an astonishing figure. It was a small turnout, 20 people, including performers, gallery owners, and me, but it felt great, real warm, filled with good readings and sweet music from major matt mason usa. The end of the gallery where we normally read was filled with a new exhibit, a menagerie of metal animals all over the floor, which were real solid and beautiful. And the other end of the gallery had a new exhibit of small paintings, including works by Edward Hopper among others.

After our canadian trio, aaron kiely, nathaniel siegel, and me went to chelsea commons, our usual after reading hangout (although after the cy press reading we didn't go there because one of the people attending talked shit about it and had us go somewhere else, and then she wound up going home. Awwww.). Nathaniel offered to treat me, which was swell because i'm broke, and i had their caesar salad, which is always good. We drank and ate for a while, with rob mclennan acting the benevolent fool, and I discovered all three of them had kids of varying ages.

And they wanted to see the Chelsea Hotel, which was only a few blocks away, so we walked over and into their lobby. They admired and took pictures of the art, which had changed since the last time i was there. And as they looked around two men around my age walked in, and i noticed that one of them was ethan hawke, who had moved into the hotel after uma thurman threw him out for cheating on her. I couldn't yell that he was there, but said something once he was by us a bit, but they didn't see him. Then Aaron and I went outside to get some air, and there was a hot, thin black-haired girl and a guy with her. Aaron had picked up his guitar,
after having left it at the gallery a month ago for the night, a typical aaron move, and now this girl started talking to him because of it. Wound up her and the guy were the band The Kills, basically think Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs 18 months ago. So the Canadians joined us outside and a guy leaves the hotel walking his dog, bumping into rob, and who was it, yes friends, ethan hawke, again.

so the moral of the story is come to our first thursdays non-ny small press series and meet kinda famous people who cheat on their wives.

another thing to mention, at the reading i traded books for cds with major matt mason usa, & listened to him (& little else) for a full two weeks afterward.

david, i must say, was a very good & kind host. cudos to him in that new york city.

Monday, February 02, 2004

a displacement in reading: Meredith Quartermain's The Eye-Shift of Surface

In an essay on Susan Howe, the American poet Cole Swensen wrote, “Words on a page or on any other surface constitute a different event from words presented in any other way. Poetry amounts to a partially heightened instance of this event because, with its attention to line break and page space, it accentuates the visual aspect, engaging our two main senses, seeing and hearing, and in much contemporary poetry, because of an emphasis on form, these two senses are engaged equally, resulting in an overload, an overflow, which spills into another zone of perception, some active hybrid between the two senses.”

What some the “language poets” often fail to realize, that words can't help but mean. Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain never suffers that, but plays off the meanings, weaving in and out of things understood. In The Eye-Shift of Surface (2003, greenboathouse books: Victoria) and previous works, such as A Thousand Mornings (2002, Nomados: Vancouver), Quartermain moves comfortably over shifting terrain, exploring those shifts, embracing them. A beautifully designed chapbook in an edition of fifty-two, published by Jason Dewinetz's greenboathouse books, The Eye-Shift of Surface is a forty-one part piece numbered up to forty, with the last fragment as an unacknowledged coda.

Eye was here. Eye was open. Eye was near. Eye was a little further, was there.Eye was all there was, eating and eaten. Eye was blue and read and closed.(p 1)

Even watching changes something, as even a passive action remains an action, and Meredith Quartermain is no passive observer. A writer capable of formidable play and patience, in Quartermain's texts, the shifts run quick along the ground, from “The is trains run on eye rails” or “With an O and an I men waven what they wede to wear” (p 2). She speaks of omens and other such. In “I Came Bearing Bears, a novel (manuscript)” from How2, Quartermain's own narrator speaks of these shifts, asking “But then who am I and who are you but people I invent?” and again, in the last line, “Can one ever cease to invent one's self? Apart from death?”

Even through her presence, she cultivates an absence, in various small press publications over the years, including Terms of Sale (1996, Meow Press: Buffalo), Abstract Relations (1998, Keefer Street: Vancouver), Spatial Relations (2001, Diaeresis: Florida), Veers (1998, Backwoods Broadsides: Maine), to more recent publications, such as the collaborative Wanders, with Robin Blaser, or A Thousand Mornings, both published by Quartermain's own Nomados, a recent press publishing various authors including Daphne Marlatt and Dodie Bellamy. Despite all of this activity, Quartermain has remained elusive in her publishing – a poem surreptitiously appearing in Xerography from Vancouver, another in an American journal, Birddog, her forthcoming chapbook with Arizona’s CHAX Press – and her first trade collection of poetry (apart from the self-published A Thousand Mornings) appearing only in spring 2005 with Edmonton’s NeWest Press, an amazing achievement for any publishing house. Although hardly a deliberate absence, she claims. Quietly, I might add.

Deliberate I am fixed. You are flickering – a light. Him to have slain besidethe haystack the gazers strike. Quick eyes gone under earth's lid – I, an epic.(p 11)

In an interview with Aaron Peck on the Greenboathouse books website, Quartermain says, “The self is a medley of discourses carried out on behalf of the state and social institutions such as the family. There is no I, but rather a myriad of I's, chattering away the texts already formulated by the social grammar. Moreover, these same social institutions have an interest in maintaining our addiction to a phantom I, a prosthetic I, so that we imagine ourselves heroes in a narrative of life in which we have real choices.” Quartermain's shift of the I/eye in this work is the focal point, well before meaning or intention, or whatever else comes through the text as secondary.

The eye moves, as does the I. A mixture of being and seeing.

There is also a repetitive shift in pieces such as those in her collection, Gospel According to Bees (2000, Keefer Street: Vancouver), from the title poem:

For pleasure's bent for jewels and justiceFor pleasure's bound for ashes and moneyFor pleasure's drink and write for morningFor pleasure's made for foreign rainFor pleasure's itch embrace its fissures fishers fish in foreign leisureFor line for line, point to point, pleasure's dome swamps all pasturesAnd therefore sailAnd therefore comeAnd therefore cities are there for herAnd therefore she will punish moneyAnd therefore play hard her sure desireHear ye therefore and therefore be sailedHear ye obscure and therefore be sacredHear ye beauteous and therefore be forestHear ye gentle and therefore be won

Quartermain’s repetition work almost as echoes, or reverb, as movements in sound that the sameness adds through its differences. Through its breaking down. From the same interview, Quartermain says, “Perhaps now we can only write of the experience of language – the experience of this chattering of discourses running hither and thither through our brains and bodies – the experience of arbitrary grammar in social relations – a grammar of global capital and the master narrative of capitalism. There is something in us that experiences. Some have called it desire. Against all of this, I set out to explore the word I and its intimate connection to eye.”

In The Eye-Shift of Surface, Quartermain manages to bring everything in. Less a collage than a deliberate weave of various threads. Everything the eye or the I can see. In the difference between looking, and seeing.

I WAS HERE IMMEDIATE OF CONSTITUENT OF INTERNALCombustion Engine. I was intermediate frequency and instrumentallanding system with flight rules identifying friend or foe.

Time the radio tuners carried IC’s like Spicer’s. Integrated circuits must have reverence to write by the sea side, waled wide.